[no subject]

Opening doors to dark places 

The risk of those who download child pornography from
the internet becoming involved in child abuse is too
high to ignore, says John Carr 

Wednesday January 22, 2003 

The arrest of Who guitarist Pete Townshend last week
for downloading child pornography from the internet
has sparked a great deal of debate about the nature of
this offence, much of it extremely ill-informed.
You cannot commit this crime by accident. On the
internet people can stumble over indecent images of
children accidentally, or they can arrive in an email
inbox unsolicited. A crime is only committed if it can
be shown that the person has gone looking for the
stuff intentionally. Whether you pay for it or not is,
strictly speaking, irrelevant. 

How might that intention be shown? This is a question
of evidence. The crown prosecution service rarely
allows prosecutions where only a handful of images
have been found on a computer but if someone has had
several hundred such "accidents" stretching over weeks
or months, they might take a different view. 

Whether a photo of a child is considered to be
indecent in the eyes of the law is in no way dependent
on the subjective state of mind of the viewer. Many
paedophiles get off on photos of children modelling
underwear in shopping catalogues. That does not make
those images illegal. 

Of course possessing child pornography is not the same
as making it or distributing it, and neither is it the
same as actually being involved in abusing the
children in order that the images can be made. English
law recognises this; they are three distinct offences
with sentences ranging in severity from five to 10 to
14 years respectively. 

It is clearly true that not everyone who deliberately
seeks out or collects child pornography is a
paedophile in the clinical sense of the word. A
majority would never ever lay a finger on a child for
sexual gratification. But many would and do. Evidence
from the US suggests it might be as many as one in
three, while preliminary findings in the UK suggest it
may be one in five. Either way, from a child
protection perspective, the risk is too high to
ignore. 

Every individual who deliberately gets involved with
this material therefore puts themselves in the frame
for investigation as a potential child abuser and that
is one of the main reasons why the word "paedophile"
gets thrown around so loosely.

Survivors of child abuse want abusive images of them
that have been put on the internet to be retrieved and
destroyed. They do not want whimsical newspaper
columnists, or anyone else, deciding they need to look
at them being abused before they can reach a view as
to whether or not they have a point. 

These survivors accept that the police and other
criminal investigators must have access to abusive
images but that is in the context of bringing them
justice. If a reporter, or anyone else, with a genuine
professional interest in the subject truly needed to
do some research in this area then, via the police,
ways could be found that are entirely consistent with
journalistic standards and ethics.

It would be foolish for anyone to assert that the
internet is directly responsible for this seeming
explosion of sexual offending against children and the
rise in the number of child pornography offences. It
is hard to know how much of this activity was going on
before the internet arrived. 

But it is undoubtedly the case that the technology has
opened up a door to a dark place and allowed people
who might otherwise never have gone near such images
to do. Admittedly they must have had a latent interest
and perhaps what we are discovering is that
predilection is far more widespread than we have
imagined.

Much more could be done, particularly by the internet
industry, both to detect illegal images as they come
online and to remove them while simultaneously
reporting them to the police in the relevant country.
It is hard to imagine making any pre-publication
vetting regime for material on the internet work, but
this is now on the agenda in the wake of major police
internet trawling operations.

For years the internet industry's response was, "It's
the parents' responsibility to keep their children
safe, not ours." That attitude is receding, but we are
still left with a sense that they are not busting a
gut to solve this pernicious problem. 

The UK government has done more than any other in the
world to get to grips with these issues, with the
support of the more responsible elements in the
internet industry. But we have all been left reeling
by recent events and with a profound feeling that we
are all going to have to up our game substantially,
and very soon.

7 John Carr is the internet adviser for the charity
NCH action for children and the Children's Charities
Coalition for Internet Safety. He is also a member of
the government's internet taskforce on child
protection.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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